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Chasing Waves by Cally PhilipsReview by Bill Kirton

This book consists of two relatively short plays, Chasing Waves and Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break and
the author’s notes on each. In those notes, she suggests that the
latter investigates areas that she refined and developed in the former,
so it seems logical to approach them from that perspective. They both
belong very clearly to the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement that people
tend to date back to the middle of the last century (or even earlier)
but which persists today.

Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break (which, from now on I’ll call 4B) is ambitious. The action switches between the present, Italy in the 1920s, Italy and Paris in the mid-late 19th century, and 14th century Genoa,
but these disparate periods are tightly linked through the characters.
Joe Green (a name which, except for one vowel, translates into Italian
as Giuseppe Verdi) is a student researching the operas of the real
Verdi, who wrote an opera about Simone Boccanegra, Il Doge de Genova.
And the fourth main character is the fictional Benito Boccanegra of the
title, a circus ringmaster who’s beaten to his goal of establishing
fascism in Italy by another Benito – Il Duce.

In
the words of the author, these characters in their separate time
periods and their separate ways, explore ‘the relationships between
fiction and reality, tragedy, history and heroism, audience and
character’. Each of them is seeking to understand something about
himself, to explain some aspect of his dilemma. It’s entertaining but
challenging. The scenes and the action move quickly and the overall
dramatic pace never drops. It’s an experimental play but one which is
built on firm stage conventions.

I enjoyed reading it but, having read Chasing Waves first,
I felt that the complexities of the personalities and their different
involvements in 4B were so absorbing in themselves that they partly
obscured the play's underlying ‘message’. On the other hand, they
brought together eras and associations which extended its scope.

Chasing Waves has
only two characters, but they’re called Wittgenstein and Schrodinger,
so we know what to expect right from the start. Except that, while it’s a
play about thought, knowledge, understanding and meaning (in short,
philosophy), it’s also funny, thought-provoking, involving and
entertaining. It has clear echoes of Waiting for Godot, both in
the repetitious and questioning nature of some of the exchanges and in
their frequent, direct acknowledgements of the presence of an audience.
It also references the Stoppard of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Their
only props are a black or white board, 2 photographs of the ‘real’
Wittgenstein and Schrodinger, and a box – the famous box, of course,
which contained (or didn’t contain) a cat, which was alive or dead or
both. But the theatrical dynamic is in the single debate they pursue
through the play, the scientist stressing the importance of knowledge,
the philosopher insisting that the goal is understanding. This is making
it sound dry and academic – it isn’t. Ideas, especially about the
fundamentals of how we perceive things and the consequent nature of the
‘reality’ we construct from those perceptions and observations are
stimulating and even fun. The two actors who call themselves
Wittgenstein and Schrodinger share the slow desperation of Vladimir and
Estragon and sometimes become frustrated at the apparent lack of
progress or the occasional stalemate. They discuss levels of ‘truth’,
the need to make choices and the ‘evidence’ we need to make such
choices.

And
the members of the audience are also participants in the debate. They
watch the action expecting to ‘learn’ something, to ‘know’ something as a
result, but Wittgenstein rejects knowledge as unreliable and, instead,
seeks understanding. Knowing what someone means isn’t the same as
understanding them. ‘Mind invests meaning in language’ says Wittgenstein
and, of course, the unreliability of language is one of the basic
themes always exploited by Absurdist drama.

The
central philosophical question is ‘What’s in the box?’ But it’s also
used as a running gag and an excuse for some good and bad miming from
the actors and some strictly theatrical effects. They talk of starts and
endings, insist on the importance of ‘now’ and recognise that all we
ever have is the moment.

The
author, in her notes, suggests that the audience must have ‘open,
enquiring minds’. Well, yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean a
po-faced notion of the elevated nature of philosophical discourse. There
are light touches of wit and humour that make this much more than a
‘thought-play’. On top of that, the author’s ‘Extras’, i.e. notes on the
production and for the enlightenment of her actors, offer the clearest
exposition of quantum theory I’ve ever read (and as I write that, it’s
important to know that, as a non-scientist, I’ve read countless books
which claim to ‘popularise’ science and which have left me as ignorant
as when I began).

Altogether,
this was an entertaining but also an instructive read. I not only
‘know’ what physicists ‘mean’ when they talk of such things, for the
moment at least, I ‘understand’ them.